Ella Davenport hasn’t been in a swimming pool since a bad decision ruined her chance of Olympic gold. So when Ella decides on a new career selling property, she chooses Chalk Hill. The country town is a long way from the water, with no pool in sight. Perfect!

Jake Honeychurch doesn’t want to sell his Nanna’s house, but circumstances force his hand. Listing the property with the rookie real estate agent in town, and asking a hefty price means it shouldn’t find a buyer. Perfect!

But determination and persistence are traits Jake admires, and Ella has them in spades. After all, no one ever made an Olympic team by being a quitter.

When news breaks of a proposed waterski park, a local developer starts sniffing around Honeychurch House. Ella’s first sale is so close she can taste it, until a sharp-eyed local recognises her.

Between sale negotiations with Jake that keep getting sidetracked, and a swimming pool committee hellbent on making a splash, Ella has more to contend with than kisses and chlorine.

Can she throw off the failures of the past and take the chance of a new start? Or will her dreams of a new life be washed away again?

I’ll say something from the outset and that has to do with how much I normally love Lily Malone’s writing. It’s just ‘Water Under the Bridge’ that didn’t quite work out right for me, despite the wonderful setting of a part of Western Australia so little explored in rural fiction and the unique rhythms of life that Malone captures very nicely here.

There’s something so wistful and close to my heart here about Ella’s new career direction and her past trauma after all—a hundred and eighty degrees somewhere else, where all hopes are pinned onto having something noteworthy marked into a new career; in Ella’s case, the sale of an overpriced home which is listed by an owner out of grumpy pretence.

That much got me through a third of it, where I soon found myself flagging. Admittedly, Ella and her constant hedging about her son’s real parentage when I thought she owed it to Jake *and* her son to be open with them tested my patience sorely; that much reduced my enjoyment of the story which inched forward only because it became a test of Ella’s inability to be honest and open with many moments that seemed deliberately engineered to stop her from doing so as well.

Ultimately, it became an exercise in frustration because it was road block after road black of stubbornness rearing its head in so many places: Ella’s reticence and overreactions and self-pity, Sam’s obstinate acting out, Abe’s refusal to talk, and the list goes on. I’m usually out to root for the protagonists in romantic fiction—if I can’t ship a pairing, then it’s pretty much useless—but the difficulty I had getting behind a female protagonist who kept blowing hot and cold (and made it so effective such that inroads were just simply impossible) definitely deterred this.

So frankly, I’m not too sure how to place my own feelings about the book. There were parts which I was enthralled with, parts that I really didn’t like, yet I’m still eager for the next book in the series because, well, Malone’s writing isn’t something I can resist.